Criteria for Choosing an Online DVD Rental Service
Whether you’ve decided to choose a DVD rental service to save time or money, or whether you just want access to a larger selection of movies, you need to find the service that is the best match for you. To do so, consider the following four factors.
1. Price
The lowest priced option is often, but not always, the best choice. When comparing prices, be sure to compare comparable plans that allow you take out the same number of movies at a time. Most DVD rental services will allow you to choose to take out two, three, or four or more movies at a time, and the three-at-a-time plan is usually the most competitively priced.
For many, price is the most important factor in a DVD rental service. However, given the power of free market competition, most comparable services now charge within $3 of each other. With less than $3 difference in price per month, you’ll probably want to place more weight on other factors.
2. Speed of Delivery
How many movies you can watch in a month doesn’t just depend on you—it depends on how fast your service of choice receives and processes your returns and mails your next movie out to you. Choose a slow service, and not only will you fail to get your bang for your buck, but you may find yourself frequently without a film to watch.
Most DVD services rely on USPS mail to send out their movies, so how fast a movie gets to you will depend in part on the location of the warehouse from which your DVDs are mailed. To test the speed of a DVD rental service, try out its free trial. Most DVD services offer a free trial of at least two weeks. This will give you enough time to gauge how long it takes from the day you return your movie until the day you receive your next movie.
3. Selection
With a DVD rental service, you finally have a chance to go back and watch all of those old movies and television shows you missed, as well as some special documentaries or foreign films not often housed in bricks and mortar rental stores. So naturally, you’ll want to peruse the websites of each rental service you’re considering to see if their selection meets your needs. Both of the major players—Blockbuster and Netflix—claim to offer over 40,000 titles. But one may have more of the type of movie you like than the other, so be sure to search their websites.
Perhaps you are not necessarily interested in a large selection, but in a specialty selection. In that case, you may not need to seek out one of the big three rental services. Instead, you may want to choose a specialty DVD rental service. For example, CleanFilms provides movies edited for profanity, sexual content, and graphic violence to an audience that may wish to view R and PG-13 rated movies but who are concerned about potentially offensive content.
4. Website Ease of Use
Once you choose a DVD rental service, you’ll be spending some time building your list of desired movies. Therefore, you’ll want to consider how easy it is to navigate the websites of the competing rental service companies. Visit each site to determine how quickly they load from your computer and to see if their search and browse methods suit your preferences. You don’t want to choose a DVD rental service to avoid time spent returning movies only to discover that it takes you hours to load and navigate an online maze.